a. Imagine that Israel has stopped its assaults on Gaza strip. Furthermore, Israel does not respond to any provocation, assault or kidnapping coming from Gaza strip. Furthermore, Israel opens its borders and lets people and merchandise go through. Eventually, Israel allows 20,000 people from Gaza to work inside Israel, and it also increases its supply of water and electricity to the Gaza strip 4 fold. How much time will it take for Hamas to cease its fire? How much time will it take for Hamas to stop other factions from harming Israel and to direct funding to infrastructures and establish an education system which doesn't teach to hate Jews and Israel? How will that affect the west bank?

b. Imagine that Hamas has stopped its assaults on Israel. Furthermore, Hamas does not respond to any provocation, assault or kidnapping coming from Israel. Furthermore, Hamas arrests everyone who attempts or plots to assault Israel, abolishes the sections in its treaty which call for the destruction of Israel and killing of Jews and arrests everyone who incites against Jews. How much time will it take for Israel to cease its fire? How much time will it take for Israel to open Gaza strip's sea and land borders and allow the movement of men and merchandise? How will that affect Israel's policy regarding the west bank?

Two weeks ago the OECD published its education report for 2008. The report got the usual media coverage, i.e. – an extremely superficial and sloppy coverage. I took some time to run over the data, as I do every year, and added it to my notes on previous reports, and on research done by Dan Ben-David from the Tel Aviv University. Here are some of the mantras that we usually hear, and the way it relates to the data:

1. "We spend too little on education. We should spend more": First, how much is enough? Furthermore, if two countries spend the same amount but the number of children in the first country is half than the number of children in the second one, is it reasonable to say that their investments are the same? Obviously not! Thus this assertion is not well defined.

2. "We spend too little on education per student. Our spending per student are the lowest amongst the OECD": The OECD tables does show it. But, alas, the OECD tables show expenditure in terms of PPP. This is OK if we want to send our children to study in Norway; but as our children study here, we should normalize the expenditure (in terms of PPP) by the standard of living, as offered by Dan Ben-David. Following this line of though leads to the conclusion that we spend much more than many of the OECD nations. Summarizing Ben-David's data (table 6) into a chart reveals that the more nations spend the less their students tend to achieve in the PISA exams:
The chart thus tells quite a different story than the assertion above. One possible interpretation of the data is – bad education costs more!

3. "We have bad ignorant teachers and bad teacher training. Such teachers cannot lead our children to achievements": This is very true (as shown by numerous reports along the years). But is it relevant? Does the quality of teachers influence the quality of education?
A good proxy to the quality of teacher could be the ratio "teacher's wage: living standards". We shall thus use the ratio "teacher's wage: GDP". If we measure achievements by the students' scores in PISA then we get a correlation of 0.64 if the wage is the average wage of a senior teacher in primary schools and a correlation of 0.82 if the wage is the average wage of a senior teacher in high school (p<0.05). Thus the ratio "teacher's wage: GDP" can explain up to 68% of the variance! How should we interoperate that? Well, teaching is a career. Everyone who considers teaching as an option will ask "what will be my future wage in this line of trade?". If the wage, compared with the standard of living, is low then many qualified young men and women will not choose teaching as their profession. As the ratio above increases many more talented people will join teaching at schools. This will have an influence on the entire system, as senior high school teachers usually teach lower grades first.

4. "Teachers wage is the most important factor influencing achievements. Thus, we should at once increase the education budget". NOT! We had many such increases which led to nothing but a decrease in achievements (see Dan Ben-David's website showing an increase in the expenditure per student from 1992-2002 and a drop in achievements in those years). The system is sick, and each increase in the budget will be wasted by the endless bureaucracy. The system should be change to make it possible for teachers and students enjoy the budget in full, and make achievements worth the spending!

5. "Our classrooms are too crowded. Making classrooms smaller will make things better": OECD data shows a correlation of -0.3 between class size and achievement (p<0.05) thus classroom size contributes at most 10% to the variance. As many of the leading countries on the achievement side have extremely crowded classroom (up to 46 on average) it is very hard to deduce that making classrooms smaller will do any good. Furthermore, making classrooms smaller and nothing more can make things worse; Making classrooms smaller means more classrooms are needed. More classrooms means more teachers which means one (or two…) of two: a. Letting teachers with a part time position teach more or b. Hiring new teachers.

Option (a) is bad – disregarding a minority of idealists, people who are willing to hold a partial position and earn peanuts are not the people we want as teachers…Option (b) is worse – this means digging under the barrel…

6. "Decentralization/Privatization means that rich kids will have education and poor kids won't as opposed to the current condition": Data shows that it is the current systems that differentiate the rich from the poor. It shows that we have the highest proportion of 9th graders who study less than 2 hours of math or less then 2 hours of science a week at school amongst OECD countries. At the same time we have the highest proportion of 9th graders who study more than 4 hours of math or more then 4 hours of science a week in private lessons. Thus the current system leads to an immense differentiation in knowledge between rich and poor, as was shown by the PISA exams.

Ethanol, a fuel produced from corn or from sugar, is a hot trend among American politicians – mostly during election seasons. Ethanol seems to be a winning card – it is supposed to reduce the dependency on gasoline, provide income to American farmers and reduce air pollution. However it seems that its only real values are that it allows politicians to bribe the Mid-West voters and help redistribute wealth from tax payers to the members of the powerful farmers lobby. Thus, instead of allowing the different energy options compete freely and lead to a more efficient solution, the American government energy policy, and its farms bill are blocking the development of valuable options.

And don't let any wide-eyed individualist tell you otherwise. The Olympics' opening ceremony was indeed impressive, to say the least. I am sure that Boris Johnson is not going to sleep well for the next 4 years, and is cursing the day he was elected for mayor of London, as there is no chance that a free country can execute such a project at such low cost. (In terms relative to the cost likely to have been incurred in a democratic system. Slavery is low-cost, but it isn't free).

Even though I did mention slavery, it should imply no presumption as to the motives of all the talented and hard working Chinese individuals that took part in that enormous project. For all I know, these people were extremely excited about it, and there was a fierce competition to get in, not only for profit (however small in western terms), but also for professional satisfaction, and for prestige. If anyone thinks that there is no such thing as voluntary slavery, they are naive, and obviously have not lived under a totalitarian regime.

Collectivism indeed does get results. But the results are of a variety different from the one that individualism gets. That's why I understand very well those who support the idea of a welfare state. I can show them all the evidence against it that is out there, including unemployment rates and low GDP, but these facts have little bearing with socialists, compared with values such as economic equality. To comparatively measure the rate of success of different kinds of regimes, one first has to define 'success'. There is often little agreement on this definition in debates between socialists and capitalists, or collectivists and individualists, and so these debates are seldom productive.

Beyond that, there is another factor that further complicates the issue, and it's the simple fact that the black and white distinction between collectivists and individualists is something that does not exist in reality, at least as far as basic emotional aspects of these values are concerned. The staunchest individualists among us could not have stayed unmoved by the Olympics opening ceremony, at least to some degree. And, as I type this, and simultaneously with the war between Georgia and Russia, there is another war on a microscopic scale of the tiny Russian libertarian community, between those who want their country to get the hell out of Georgia, and those who have suddenly felt their nationalistic instincts come to the fore. An impressive opening ceremony is a success in most people's book, even the more individualistic among us. And so is a forceful invasion of a foreign country is a success that is difficult to argue with, especially if one has found good enough reasons to call it a just war. Similarly, equality is a good thing in the eyes of most people, albeit to widely varying degrees.

And so, what makes most of us really different, especially collectivists vs. individualists, is the price we are willing to pay for success. This is the major deciding factor, well before we define for ourselves what is it that we want to achieve, and what would constitute a success in each particular case. Like many, I watched the opening ceremony with very mixed feelings. Along with admiring the enormity of the project, the precision of execution, and the amazing aesthetic value of the show, I couldn't help but keep thinking about millions of Chinese people who were forced to pay for it out of their meager income, those who had the roads they take every day to go to work, market, school or doctor blocked (the same roads the construction of which was paid out of their pockets as well), those people whose homes were demolished to make room for the fancy hotels to house the Olympics spectators.

It is all a matter of price, and the most important (and the most difficult) decisions we humans have to make throughout our lives are the ones where we have to decide on the price we are willing to pay for things that our hearts desire. From those proverbial cans of Coke (one being offered to us in a restaurant at our leisure, the other for sale while we are in the desert on the brink of exhaustion), to our decision to send those most dear to us, our sons, to fight our most just wars.

Oddly enough, a real thick kid at my secondary school had a tour of CERN (I still don't know why) but he did and he wound up having lunch in the canteen with three Nobel Prize winners who were not Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat and Al Gore.

I tend to agree with MK Rivlin (one of the more decent ones), that revoking Bishara's pension might prove counterproductive. I do have a solution of my own though: revoke all MKs' pensions, and kill 120 birds' worth with one stone many times over!

Because of an argument on another blog, I was reminded of an article on that famous coup. If anyone still has this romantic view on the subject, where a brutal dictator overthrew a popularly elected do-gooder, better read it. The dictator was brutal, no question about that, but the popularly elected do-gooder turns out to be a myth.